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Nalates Urriah

Second Life News Week #33 Late

General News

Busy week for me in RL. I’m behind. MIssed the Topless Cruise. We do have interesting news.

We had the first Content Creators’ meeting in a couple of weeks. Vir Linden gave us a little information on what came up in the Linden Summit Meeting held in Massecuites a couple of weeks ago.

orinoco valley

The ARCTan project is being set at a priority such that we will likely see work resuming on it this quarter.

EEP and BoM are hopefully to soon release. Vir is on BoM now. There are a few bugs blocking the release of each. EEP has some performance issues and problems with various graphics cards. BoM has good overall performance. But shadows and alphas still have some render problems.

Also, there should be a new Animesh Project Viewer out soon. This will have the Phase II stuff, animesh customization. There will be LSL stuff to play with.

Dirt Sim 421 is the server-side of the viewer on ADITI that works with this coming Animesh Viewer.

Another coming improvement is Terrain. This is one of the oldest remaining untouched features of SL. I have not seen it change since I came into SL in 2008. It is one of the few features where OpenSim is ahead of SL. No information on what might change, but there are a number of JIRA reports for changes to terrain editing. I suspect some of them will be addressed.

Patch Linden announced Monday the release of an update to the Linden Home Security system. See the details here.

Bellisseria got 40 new regions Monday, Squishy Pickle. Daniel Voyager keeps up on the land developments in Bellisseria. It seems there is still a waiting line for Bellisseria homes.

Word is Firestorm users are experiencing an uptick in inventory problems. I have heard a couple complaining about mesh items not fully rendering, pieces missing. This would be for users of the latest version 6.2.4, which is working well for me.

The Lab thinks part of the inventory problem is from problems during login and is looking at adding more inventory checks during login to allow viewers to recover.

VR for Second Life is being experimented with by Peter Kappler using a custom version of Firestorm. Hamlet summarizes things and points to Austin Tate’s Blog where the details are. They say this Firestorm version should be “compatible with Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.”

The download and install instructions are here. Some help with joystick settings can be found here.

This SL VR version suffers from low frame rates and choppy display, which is to be expected. Even a higher-end computer doesn’t have the needed horsepower.

The 30 to 50 FPS (too slow for comfortable VR) talked about in the articles are obtained with the use of the Xeon 3.5MHz CPU and NVIDIA 1080 GPU. The Xeon processors are designed for large, critical data processing tasks. They are overkill for running an SL viewer, which has a single large thread and a number of small ancillary threads. So, i5 and i7 CPUs with a GTX-1080 will likely give similar results.

Servers

Blue Steel and Le Tigre were to get #19.08.07.529856. This is listed as having Internal Script Improvements. Some have taken this to mean it has to do with Scripts Run %. There are a few comments in the Deploys thread.

Magnum is to get #19.08.06.529800. This is listed as a Maintenance release containing internal fixes.

Some people with regions in Blue Steel and Le Tigre say their regions restarted multiple times. In the end, the Blue and Tigre regions rolled to version #19.08.06.529800. We can assume there was a problem with #19.08.07.529856.

As best I can tell there has been no improvement in Scripts Run %. I look at Bumrose to see if things have improved. There is a helipad there I like to take off from. It takes forever to get a Shergood helicopter started with only 14% of scripts running per frame.

Unfortunately, it is on the main channel running #19.06.14.528215. So, I can’t tell anything. All the airports in Eden are on the main channel. I’ll have to find a region on an RC channel.

We have one report of the Script Run % improving in a region. It is after the restart. So, it is hard to tell what caused the improvement, new software or the restart. We do see regions improve after some restarts. It seems random so far. Some region owners are just restarting their region until they see the Scripts Run % jump up to 100%.

Viewers

The main viewer is now 6.2.4.529638, which is a new default version. This was previously called the Love Me Render RC viewer. The previous was 6.2.3.527758 released June 5, week #27.

Quoting from the Release Notes,

This viewer adds a variety of graphics/rendering related fixes.

Note: for Mac displays with HiDPI support, the retina display mode will be enabled by default. This will generally give you a sharper display but a lower frame rate. If you want to disable HiDPI display, go to the preference settings page Me->Preferences->Graphics->Advanced Settings, and uncheck the box “Enable support for HiDPI displays (requires restart)”; then restart the viewer.

Maintenance – 6.2.5.530030 – New – Released Thursday, August 15, 2019, week #33. This viewer has a couple of dozen bug fixes. If you are having a viewer problem, check the release notes to see if it has a fix you need.